About 30% of people with ADHD get limited benefit from methylphenidate. A Fukui mouse study found adding a D2 drug helped mice missing the protein NSF, but the same combo made normal mice more impulsive.
A 26-site, two-year double-blind trial in Japan found high-absorption curcumin did not cut colon polyp recurrence overall (risk ratio 0.98), but large adenomas were about 44% lower. Not proof of cancer prevention.
The 47th Honda Prize goes to Graeme Clark and Ingeborg Hochmair for the multichannel cochlear implant, now fitted in more than one million people. Why did a carmaker founder's foundation pick it?
On October 2, 2026, a Sapporo hospital gave the first commercial dose of Akuugo to a man paralyzed in a traffic accident. Why it took over two years, and what the trial evidence shows.
Cyclo-octasulfur, the yellow sulfur of volcanoes, is made and stored in fat droplets in mouse and human cells. It won't dissolve in water and breaks apart when measured; a chemistry capsule caught it.
A Japan-led team corrected the single-letter mutation behind the inherited nerve disease HMSN-P without cutting DNA, with effects in model mice and in patient-derived organoids, plus the 40 years of work behind it.
Japan's National Institute of Genetics and Danish partners built a photovoltaic retinal implant with carbon electrodes and 40-micrometer pixels. The implant already in patients uses 100, and that width sets the ceiling.
A Japanese team pinned down when CD4 killer T cells start to expand: right around age 100. The study needed blood from ten donors over 110, and the cohort that could supply them took thirty years to build.
A 1977 paper by two Japanese ENT doctors, from airflow readings on 15 men, said to blow one nostril at a time. It won the 2026 Ig Nobel medicine prize 49 years later, at a ceremony that had left the US for Zurich.
The 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Masashi Yanagisawa and Emmanuel Mignot for orexin. It explained narcolepsy, but the industry built sleeping pills first. The narcolepsy drug arrived 28 years later.
Get out of bed if you are not asleep in 20 minutes. That rule belongs to CBT-I, which a University of Tokyo analysis puts at 41% remission against 28% for pills. Japan covered it in June 2026, after rejecting it in 2024.